Many celebrities who rode the wave of stardom have been drowning in a sea of humiliation this month. Since the beginning of this month a series of private pictures of famous people have been released onto the web. Pictures include Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and many other female stars. The source of these leaks has been a confirmed as a hacker or series of hackers invading the iClouds of these women.

Alec Nolan, an iPhone owner, expressed his view, “I think it’s scary that these people have the ability to hack into my phone and see whatever they want.”

Investigators have been looking for the source of this mayhem and have been struggling up to this point in finding out who is behind it. A lot of fingers are being pointed at the “Find my iPhone” feature on the iPhone. Many people believe that the hackers used this app and guessed passwords until they were correct. This technique is called “brute force.” They then would log into the iCloud account using that password, and accessing the pictures.

Angela Holmes-Cruz, another iPhone owner, said, “I hate to see this happen, it could ruin people’s lives.”

Rumors are now being aroused that Apple knew about the security issues associated with the celebrity pictures long before the pictures had been released to the web.

According to The Daily Dot, “Emails between Apple and a security researcher showed that he informed the company of a security flaw back in March.”

As of now many of these celebrities have hired attorneys to figure how who was behind this breach of privacy. Most of them hope to proceed with the prosecution of the people who committed the crime.

Here are some helpful tips to make sure this doesn’t happen to you:

• Make strong passwords. Hackers are familiar with the easy passwords people sometimes choose to use.
• Keep many different passwords for all of your accounts. Once the hacker finds out one password he will likely try most of your other accounts using the same information.
• Lastly, don’t save anything you wouldn’t like anyone else seeing. Once it reaches the web it will be there forever.

FSA Practice:

1. What is the main idea of this article?
2. What is the connotation of the word aroused?
3. Which sentence in the article summarizes the article?
4. What do you think is the authors opinion based on the story?
5. Who are the subject of the article?